Work on the deals side or support of the Portoflio

bump

Any opinions?

I switch between the two pretty regularly. I like variety personally and couldn't really do just one. Whenever I get burned out or bored of the deal side I switch to ops etc... But if I had to pick one...definitely ops but more strategic and less bullshit typical ops stuff.

I do 50/50 deals and portfolio company support. Both sides have really interesting and shitty moments. Operations can be very engaging if the circumstances allow it (re-strategizing, creating infrastructure for the management team, etc.) or super tedious (management drama, forensic accounting on bad CFO work, etc.). Likewise for cool deals you find and want to pursue vs having to write a memo for a company you don't believe in that a partner shoved to you.

All-in-all, I think the cool side of portfolio work outshines cool deals for me but that's because my end goal is to be an operator. The main drawback is that my career path is now incredibly vague and my opportunities are dependent on the relationships I nurture.

ALSO, if anyone moved from operations support to a portco or startup, HMU as I would love to hear more about your journey :)

Great responses - appreciate the answers and insights.

Portfolio side because you get to work with a (hopefully) competent and experienced exec team to together figure out some meaningful strategic issue. They may not know the answer but they know a lot about the context and some semblance of the right questions to ask.

In contrast, on the deal side, I was at a generalist firm and always felt like I was grasping around in the dark trying to figure out a new industry myself - didn't even know how to think about which questions to ask at the beginning of many deals.

Being part of the life of the invested company is exactly what distinguishes PE (and activist investment for some part) from passive investment. Instead of simply betting that your bets will pay off, the investor has to actively work on creating his own return. It's the essence of the triumph of the individual capabilities and abilities, the faber fortuna suae.

Working with the companies is where the thesis of the investment proves to be correct and if not there's room to changing and adapting to the environment - the essence of human nature. A passive investor picks some stocks on the basis of an undervaluation but after that he just stays at the window, monitoring what happens and eventually closing his position at a profit/loss. In PE you are at the centre of the stage, taking part in the play. It changes somehow the paradigm of the investment game.

I simply can't understand how this part could be less thrilling than negotiating with a seller first and a buyer then. It's the life of the business, if you don't love it, stay away from PE.

I think each one reinforces the other. Very much a 1+1=3. I find portfolio company support to generally be more annoying but ultimately I want something around 50/50 because each one makes me better at the other.

Honestly, I can't stand post-deal portfolio work. I find it to be very mundane, often administrative, and severely lacking in intellectual stimulation. Most operational decisions seem like complete common sense to me.

I'm much more drawn to investment thesis generation, industry research, and the weighing of the likelihood of a business being successful compared to potential returns.

This is likely a personality trait though. The incremental learning curve after DD is quite low, and I personally like to be jumping on as many learning curves as possible and churning those curves repeatedly.